The Internet is now being used for a number of commercial purposes, including purchase and rental of movie films in different media formats. One such popular website is maintained by Netflix®, where subscribers can search, review and select movie titles (in DVD media format). If a particular title is available, the subscriber's choice is then placed into a rental selection “queue.” During an interactive online session, a subscriber can select a number of titles, and then prioritize them in a desired order for shipment within the selection queue.
After the movie title selection session is over, the system proceeds to ship the desired tides in the order requested by the subscriber. The selections are mailed to the user in special packaging, which include return mailers pre-printed and adapted for such movie media. This minimizes the inconvenience to the subscriber, but there is an indeterminate processing and mailing delay therefore associated with each selection. In most instances, a selection is mailed the same day, but even in such cases, there is typically a three day transaction period associated between the selection, processing, shipment, mail transit and receipt of a particular title.
After shipment, these titles then appear in a list identified essentially as items that are outstanding (i.e., movies that have not yet been returned by the user) within a “titles out” queue. Under one option of the Netflix terms of service, the system places a limit on the number of outstanding titles that a subscriber may have at any one time (typically, a function of the level of service agreement, with more $$/month resulting in more titles). Thus, if the user selects more movies than they can acquire at one time, the remaining movie titles remain as un-shipped items in the rental selection queue. Additional titles in the rental selection queue are only shipped to the user after the system logs a returned item from that same user. This happens automatically, so the user does not need to return to the Netflix website to request the shipment. At the same time, however, the user is not consulted in the decision to ship the next item; it happens without his/her approval or advance notice.
The aforementioned system is further described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,584,450, which is hereby incorporated by reference. The '450 patent explains the above policy in terms of a “MAX” out approach for servicing rental customers. Notably, the aforementioned disclosure also mentions that the MAX out approach can only be altered under certain exceptions, such as where the customer agrees to pay a surcharge.
A limitation of the aforementioned system is that while the system automatically ships the next items in the rental queue it fails to consider whether the user may in fact want to “veto” the next item in the queue, either because their tastes have changed, or if they might have already seen the title. As users sometimes fill up their request queues months in advance with dozens of titles, and they typically only see 6-8 movies per month, there is a strong possibility that one more of such titles will be stale after several months.
A further limitation, of course, is that the user must always return another title before the next title in their queue is shipped to them. While this is somewhat useful for inventory tracking purposes, the user is handicapped by the fact that after they posit the returned title in the mail, they have little or no control over how quickly or accurately such return will be processed by the mail, or the rental service.
Finally, it is conceivable that on many occasions, from the perspective of the service provider, it will be desirable to ship another title to a customer, regardless of a status of their delivery queue, and without applying a surcharge. In other words, in order to promote certain titles, retain certain customers, or balance supply/demand, a service provider may want to automatically ship more than the “Max Out” figure to a particular customer, based on some triggering event.